Contrary to the received wisdom holding that logical empiricism
emigrated to America without the social and political engagements it
maintained in Vienna and Berlin, this paper documents that during the
last half of the 1930s logical empiricism was received and respected
in America by leftist intellectuals as a socially powerful
intellectual project. Emphasis is placed upon Otto Neurath's Unity of
Science Movement, led by Neurath with Rudolf Carnap and Charles
Morris, and their various relationships and alliances with the
so-called New York Intellectuals, including Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook,
Horace Kallen and others. On the basis of this revision, the rise and
dominance of logical empiricism as a technical and non-political
project in the 1950s should be understood not as an effect of
emigration but rather as a response to the relatively right-wing
intellectual climate of cold war America. Evidence is provided that
Neurath, Carnap, and the Unity of Science Movement were perceived
inside and outside the academy as socialist or "pink" and that leading
philosophers of science in the early 1950s consciously developed
philosophy of science as a technical, non-political profession that
downplayed the socialist values and goals characteristic of pre-war
logical empiricism.

George Reisch is an independent scholar who received his Ph.D. in
History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Chicago in
1995. His research concerns the reception and growth of logical
empiricism in America and he has published articles in Philosophy of
Science, British Journal for the History of Science, and other
journals. He has taught at Northwestern University, Illinois Institute
of Technology and is currently writing a book about the Unity of
Science Movement in America and its decline in the 1950s. He is
supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Since the heyday of the Vienna Circle, many philosophers of science
have denied that the practice of the sciences is free from moral,
social or political values. In recent decades, historians and
sociologists of science have painted a very different picture, one in
which the development of the sciences is pervaded by judgments of
value and in which objectivity is an illusion. I claim that both these
pictures are inadequate. I'll try to explain the ways in which value
judgments enter into the practice of the sciences and why they allow
for a notion of scientific objectivity.

Philip Kitcher was born in London in 1947, and spent his early life in
Eastbourne, Sussex, on the South Coast of England. From 1958 to 1966,
he attended Christ's Hospital, and then went to Christ's College
Cambridge to study mathematics. After leaving Cambridge, he went to
Princeton University, where he obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy/history
and philosophy of science. Since then, he has taught at Vassar
College, the University of Vermont, the University of Minnesota, the
University of California at San Diego, and, most recently at
Columbia. His principal interests have been in the philosophy of
science. After working on the philosophy of mathematics early in his
career, he began to write on issues in the philosophy of biology and
in general philosophy of science. He is currently interested in the
ethical and political constraints on scientific research, the
evolution of altruism and morality, and the apparent conflict between
science and religion. He continues, however, to write on some of the
topics treated in his earlier publications.
Books:
Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism. MIT Press, 1982; The
Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. Oxford University Press, 1983;
Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature. MIT
Press, 1985; The Advancement of Science, Oxford University Press,
1993;
The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human
Possibilities. Simon.and Schuster 1996; Science, Truth and
Democracy. Oxford University Press, forthcoming November 2001; In
Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical reflections on Biology, forthcoming
Fall 2002.